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Nightmare Wrap-Up: The Voice of Isengard + Ring-makerhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/nightmare-wrap-up-the-voice-of-isengard-ring-maker/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/nightmare-wrap-up-the-voice-of-isengard-ring-maker/#commentsMon, 26 Aug 2019 01:14:46 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22380Continue reading Nightmare Wrap-Up: The Voice of Isengard + Ring-maker]]>Saruman’s plans have been set in motion. Throughout the Voice of Isengard / Ring-maker cycle, our Heroes have aided the White Wizard in several of his inscrutable plans: we captured an Uruk for him, fetched a secret ring-mould from Celebrimbor’s forge, and united Dunland under a new Chieftain who owes Saruman a favor. Unbeknownst to our Heroes, all these events will ultimately culminate in Saruman’s betrayal of Rohan when he sends an army of Dunlandings and home-grown Uruk-hai to war against the horse-lords.

Not everyone I’ve spoken to loves the dramatic irony of this
cycle’s narrative, but I personally find it to be delicious.

In previous cycles, I made no attempt to make the deck
themes form any sort of cohesive narrative from quest to quest. This time, I
thought that things might turn out differently. That I might be able to turn my
string of decks into some sort of continuous story once I had reached the end. I’m
not quite sure where that hunch came from, other than the fact that Dunland
(where most of this cycle takes place) doesn’t inspire any deck ideas all on
its own.

So, was I right? Is there a single narrative to be told
here?

Let’s look at the decks

Here’s the complete list of decks that I built for this
cycle:

1. Children of Rohan (The Fords of Isen)The children of ThéodenÉomer / Éowyn / Théodred

Except for my Ent deck, The Forest Wakes, every
single deck that I built this cycle had a version of Éowyn in it. A
surprisingly large number of them (7 of 9) feature a version of Elfhelm as well.
That wasn’t intentional, at least not until I noticed the pattern in the final
few decks, but it does lend itself somewhat to a narrative reading.

In hindsight, it makes sense that if I’m building Rohan
decks, these two are bound to make frequent appearances. Hero Éowyn’s 4
willpower makes her a key problem-solver for the otherwise questing-starved Rohan
Hero lineup, allowing me to consistently quest hard out of the gate (often a
must-have in Nightmare quests). Tactics Elfhelm, on the other hand,
functions almost as a neutral colored Feint when I have a healthy supply
of Rohan Heroes—he’s so often useful that there’s almost no reason not
to include him.

Éowyn and Elfhelm, then, are my chief protagonists, and this
is their story.

The Ballad of Éowyn and Elfhelm

Our tale begins with the children of Théoden—Éowyn, Éomer,
and Théodred—out on a ride together. Their revelry is cut short, however, as
they near the Fords of Isen and hear the sounds of battle. There,
Elfhelm and a small band of Rohirrim (who had been escorting the king’s trusted
advisor, Gríma, to Isengard) are being assaulted by Dunlandings. The three
young nobles charge into battle and rout the Dunlandings, saving the day.

They decide to accompany the band to Isengard to see Gríma
safely along his journey. The White Wizard bids them all remain within the
safety of the tower’s obsidian walls for a while, and being in dire need of
rest, they agree. But after a few days, Saruman sees an opportunity and asks a
favor of Elfhelm and his men—he needs To Catch an Orc. Éomer tells his
sister to remain in the safety of the tower, but she senses something is off about
Isengard, even if she can’t quite put her finger on what it is, and insists on
going along on the hunt. In the end, she wears him down and he agrees on
condition of her remaining safe in the center of the troupe and fleeing at the
first sign of battle.

Being Éowyn, of course, she doesn’t do that, and instead
ends up almost single-handedly luring the Orc, Mugash, into the trap that the
Rohirrim had set for him.

But on the return journey, Mugash loosens his bonds and
escapes Into Fangorn, where he meets a bunch of scary moving trees. The
forest itself nearly kills him, and he ends up getting thrown back out and—his
spirit broken—recaptured by the Rohirrim.

From there, the party returns to Isengard victorious, and
after a few more days everyone returns home. But Saruman has decided that
Elfhelm and his men were effective pawns for his schemes, so he sends Gríma to him
with a new mission—this one taking a small band of Rohirrim West of the Misty
Mountains.

Éowyn hears word of Elfhelm gathering stout warriors to
perform another task for the White Wizard, and—having acquired a taste for
adventure—devises a clever plan. She will disguise herself as a young soldier
by the name of Dernhelm, join this band of adventurers, and see the wider world
beyond the fields of Rohan. (This would not be the last time she takes on this persona).

The task seems simple: purchase a map from a dwarf named Nalir
in Tharbad, and then follow it to find some sort of artifact. Unfortunately,
nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

The Dunland Trap is sprung on the Old South Road, a
few days’ journey from the Gap of Rohan. Beset by Dunlandings, the band is
lured into a deep ravine where they are ultimately subdued and captured. They
learn that Dunland is divided into three warring clans—Boar, Raven, and
Wolf—and that whichever clan recovers the Antlered Crown from a set of ancient
burial mounds will earn the right to rule over all Dunland.

Chief Turch of the Boar Clan presses the Rohirrim into
service, promising them freedom in exchange for the Crown. With no other
choice, they descend into the burial grounds.

Unbeknownst to all, the burial grounds are guarded by a
troupe of Dúnedain, who know of the danger and make it their job to ensure that
nobody blunders into them unintentionally. They are unable to stop the Rohirrim
from awakening the barrow wights, and so they leap into the fray to assist
them. The three guardian spirits fall to their combined might, The Three
Trials are passed, and the Antlered Crown is claimed for the Boar Clan.
Chief Turch upholds his end of the bargain, returning their belongings to them
and allowing them to continue their mission.

The band of Rohirrim explain the details of their quest to
the trusty Dúnedain, who agree to accompany them to Tharbad to ward off any
other would-be attackers. After all, they know the North-South Road well, and can
discern which areas are most likely to be watched by unfriendly eyes.

Unfortunately, the troupe runs into some Trouble in Tharbad,
as their meeting to purchase the map from Nalir is interrupted by several orcs
led by a man named Bellach. He steals the map himself and orders his orcs to
find and kill all of the interlopers. The Dúnedain lead their newfound allies
into The Nîn-in-Eilph to evade their pursuers, picking a route that only
rangers of the North could safely navigate.

… This, unfortunately, is where the story starts to fall
apart a bit. My next deck is an Ent deck, so, I guess the band of heroes
are, like, helped by the swamp itself somehow? Perhaps the very landscape sees
their plight and ensures they can find a safe way out. For some reason. Also,
Aragorn is here to help! Maybe he was hanging out at Tharbad and it was his
idea to go into the swamp?

In any case, when they finally emerge from the Swanfleet,
they rush to Ost-in-Edhil—the location denoted by the map—so they can beat
Bellach to discovering Celebrimbor’s Secret artifact. Having been there
before, Aragorn agrees to help the band of Rohirrim navigate the ruined city.

Éowyn manages to locate the artifact—an ancient ring mould—before
Bellach and his orcs, but the villain finds her and takes it away, forcing
Elfhelm and Aragorn to hunt down the villain and slay him. Seeing their leader
fallen, the orcs break off pursuit and disappear to the North.

This is where Aragorn and the Rohirrim part ways, with
Aragorn following the orcs to ensure they don’t cause any trouble for the
denizens of Eriador (bonus: set-up for next cycle!) while the Rohirrim head
South to return their prize to Saruman.

On their return journey, the band discovers that war has
come to Dunland. It seems that the Raven Clan has refused the Boar Clan’s claim
to The Antlered Crown and Chief Turch needs assistance putting the rebels
down and consolidating Dunland under his rule.

Once again, my deck gets a little hazy with the narrative
here. It’s clearly a pitched large-scale battle, so it doesn’t make much sense
that a small band of Rohirrim would turn the tide. Indeed, my deck suggests
that Théoden himself rides out with an éored to help squash the resistance.

But if that were the case, I would have expected Chief
Turch’s loyalty to go towards making peace with the King of Rohan rather than owing
Saruman a debt of gratitude. Instead, I seem to be left with the somewhat
unsatisfactory interpretation that Théoden’s presence in the deck was
representative of Éowyn’s thoughts of her king, inspiring her to do great
deeds—rather than his actual bodily presence.

And so, Dernhelm proved himself a great and terrible warrior
during this battle, leaving a lasting impression on Dunlanding and Rohirrim
alike. Years later, when tempers once again flared between Rohan and Dunland,
Elfhelm sent for the young hero from the battle of the Antlered Crown. He believed
Dernhelm could help parley with the Chief of Dunland, reminding him that it was
a man of Rohan who helped to put that crown upon his head. But to Elfhelm’s
surprise and dismay, Dernhelm was nowhere to be found—in fact, none could
recall where he had been raised, or where he had returned to after their
adventure for the White Wizard.

It was as if the young hero had simply passed into legend.

Narrative decks

Despite a few bumps along the way, I managed to get a
halfway decent narrative out of my decks for this cycle. This isn’t an entirely
new concept for me. Indeed, whenever I play a cycle for the first time, I often
loosely interpret my games this way, imagining the hijinks that my characters
are getting up to as I clear each successive quest.

So, is this a model I’ll be following for future cycles in
my Thematic Nightmare series?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I have a few reasons for that:

First, I like to use my Thematic Nightmare series to spur
myself to build new and interesting decks that I can take to my friendly local
game store and play with friends. And as a thematic player, I like my themes to
be self-contained. Unfortunately, when I’m building decks to fit a narrative, I
can get some weird themes, like “The Rohirrim meet some Dúnedain in Dunland”, that
don’t really read as thematic decks outside of the context of this playthrough.
There’s nothing wrong with these decks, of course, but they don’t do much for
the part of me that loves to see a theme come together. The only deck I built
this cycle that I’m excited to use in other contexts is the first one, Children of
Rohan, which is a fun modern take on some classic Rohan Heroes.

Second, it’s hard to plan these things out. The very nature
of Nightmare mode frustrates attempts to use the same or similar decks for each
quest in the cycle. When I hit a wall and the deck I was hoping to use doesn’t
work as well as I wanted it to, I compromise on the narrative, which makes for
a less satisfying overall experience.

And finally, you may have noticed that my posting on this
blog has slowed significantly. I started this cycle in January of 2018—about a
year and a half ago. That’s a very long time to try to hold a single narrative
in my head and try to steer it in a satisfying way! The blog works much better
for me if I can treat each quest as its own separate challenge, giving me the
freedom to take quests on as I find the time.

So! It was a fun experiment, and I’m glad I tried it. But I don’t
think I will return to it any time soon.

Narrative aside, how was the cycle itself?

Last cycle, I noticed an uptick in the difficulty of many of the quests compared to the first two. If this cycle is any indication, the Nightmare-means-Nightmare difficulty level seems to be here to stay. Many of the quests in The Voice of Isengard / The Ring-maker took a lot of deck optimization time to get to a place where I could defeat them consistently. The Dunland Trap, The Nîn-in-Eilph, and The Antlered Crown all took many attempts before I was able to build a deck that could achieve a 3/5-win ratio or better. And I never quite managed it for To Catch an Orc or The Three Trials.

Some of these quests, like The Three Trials and The Antlered
Crown, were quite fun despite (or perhaps because of) the difficulty. Others
like To Catch an Orc and The Nîn-in-Eilph were kind of just miserable—at least
in solo.

Nightmare impacts

In the previous cycles, many quests played significantly
differently between standard and Nightmare difficulties. Easy quests could
become hard, loopholes were closed, and the strategies required to beat the
quests often changed or deepened.

That doesn’t seem to have happened in this cycle. For the most part, the boring quests are still boring, the fun quests are still fun, and the middle-of-the-road quests are still sitting in the middle of that road. The relative difficulties of the quests in Nightmare mode are about the same, too. There are no easy-to-hard upsets like there were last cycle with Encounter at Amon Dîn.

The only possible exception to this is The Three Trials,
which picked up some new Spirit Enemies that buff their respective boss
when they’re in play. It adds an interesting and dynamic twist to a quest that
was originally light on non-boss Enemies.

The biggest surprise for me was The Fords of Isen—I just had a great time with it. I don’t know if it was always a fun quest and I just overlooked it the first time I played it, or if the lovely art that the Nightmare version adds to the deck is what won me over, but something about it really clicked for me. I want to play it more. Perhaps I’ll bring it with me to Con of the Rings this year!

The biggest disappointment of the cycle was Into Fangorn. When
the quest first came out, I remember really liking the concept of Enemies that
do something other than attack during the Combat phase—but the original quest
was super easy. I was hoping that Nightmare mode would give this quirky quest a
little more bite, but I guess it just wasn’t in the cards for this one. The
Nightmare version is at least as easy as the original, maybe even easier. Unfortunately,
Into Fangorn still won’t be hitting my table very often.

All-up, Voice of Isengard / The Ring-maker remains a
lukewarm cycle in Nightmare mode. It’s made of equal parts duds, standard
quests, and gems, with each category spanning the difficulty curve. Much of it
is worth replaying, but as a whole it’s a pretty mixed bag. If I were to play
the cycle again, I might consider simply skipping To Catch an Orc, Into
Fangorn, and The Nîn-in-Eilph altogether—the narrative probably wouldn’t be
harmed much (if at all) and I bet I would have a better overall impression of
it.

The Nightmare goes ever onward…

The next cycle will take place West of the Misty Mountains,
in and around the lands of the Dúnedain, Noldor, and Hobbits—my three favorite
traits in the game! I’m looking forward to seeing what sorts of new and
interesting decks arise from my adventures there.

But first, as a break between the Nightmare cycles I’m going
to play through The Ruins of Belegost, a longtime favorite of mine that
doesn’t hit my table nearly often enough!

On your return journey to Isengard, you find war in Dunland. The Raven Clan has refused the Boar’s claim to The Antlered Crown, and chief Turch asks you to join his Clan as they march to battle. Seeing an opportunity to earn Saruman the friendship of a unified Dunland, you agree to join forces and fight…

Battle for Dunland

And with that flavor text, it slowly
begins to dawn on us exactly what this whole cycle was about. Not only did we help
Saruman acquire a ring-mould from Celebrimbor’s forge, but now we’re consolidating
the disparate clans of Dunland under the service of the White Wizard. My usage
of Rohan decks throughout the cycle makes the irony even sweeter—it
means the Rohirrim played a pivotal part in the creation of their own demise,
building Saruman’s army for him. But our Heroes don’t have time to consider the
consequences right now; battle is joined!

Time for our Crowning Achievement!

As the capstone of the Ring-maker
cycle, The Antlered Crown makes heavy use of the two major mechanics developed
throughout the rest of the cycle: the Time X keyword, and the Dunlendings’ tendency
to punish you for drawing cards or having too many cards in hand. The
innovation this time is that the Time X keyword appears on all the Locations in
the deck—meaning you have to clear them fast or suffer some nasty consequences.

It’s hard enough to prevent Location
Time effects from going off in solo play, what with cards like Raven Clan
Druid and Raising the Cry stealing Time counters from them left and
right. The Nightmare card for the scenario ensures that at higher player
counts, there’s no way for you to avoid all the Time effects: it prevents you
from clearing Locations in the Staging Area if they still have Time counters on
them. The best you can hope to do is to clear the Active Location each round
and pick off the worst effects before they have a chance to wreck you.

Fortunately, you’re not without help. Chief Turch (the primary antagonist from The Dunland Trap) is back, but this time as an Objective-Ally whose superpower is not exhausting to defend. That’s nice, since there are a lot of 2 attack Enemies in this quest—but you have to watch out for the handful of shadow effects that give Enemies attack boosts. Because he’s immune to player card effects, he can’t be healed, and you can’t meaningfully buff his defense. If you accidentally lose Turch to a stray shadow effect, it’s game over!

Ranting and Raven

The other wrinkle in this quest is
its use of the Raven Deck, a small deck of Enemies kept in reserve so they can
be brought into play through other encounter card effects. The Nightmare
version adds a few nasty surprises to the Raven Deck in the form of two copies
of the new Dunlending Horde Enemy, in addition to the already-nasty cards
that were hanging out in there like the Dunland Chieftain and Dunland
Raider. All of these guys are ready and willing to absolutely ruin your day
at a moment’s notice.

The Raven Deck sees a lot of use in
Nightmare mode, with a seemingly unending supply of Raven Strongholds unavoidably
dumping fresh Enemies into play, and Treacheries like Gathering Forces bringing
them extra reinforcements whenever you least expect it. This, combined with the
nasty Enemies already in the encounter deck, makes The Antlered Crown an Enemy-heavy
experience. Even as a solo player, it’s possible to start the turn with zero
Enemies in play and end it with four (or more).

The first two Stages of the quest
are standard fare: the first has a Time 3 effect that removes Time counters
from Locations in play, while the second has a Time 3 effect that dumps more
Enemies in from the Raven deck. The last stage (somewhat humorously named “The
Last Stage”—no, really, go look it up) pits
you against the Raven Chief and his Camp (both of which also have
especially uninspired names, actually). This is where the battle reaches a fever
pitch. You have to clear the Camp (hopefully before its devastating
exhaust-all-your-damaged-characters Time effect goes off) so you can damage the
Chief, and all the while you have to endure a Time 2 effect on The Last Stage
that gives every engaged Enemy an extra attack.

If you manage to slay the Raven
Chief, then you have successfully unified Dunland under the control of the Boar
Clan, granting Saruman a powerful ally in his eventual war against Rohan. Hooray?

Deck: At the Spear’s Point

Without a word or cry, suddenly, the riders halted. A thicket of spears were pointed towards the strangers; and some of the horsemen had bows in hand, and their arrows were already fitted to the string. Then one rode forward, a tall man, taller than all the rest; from his helm as a crest a white horsetail flowed. He advanced until the point of his spear was within a foot of Aragorn’s breast.

The Riders of Rohan, The Two Towers

Theme: The Spearmen of Rohan

Hero (3)Éowyn (The Flame of the West)
Háma (The Long Dark)
Théoden (The Morgul Vale)

Inspiration

I wanted this last deck of the cycle
to be solidly a Rohan deck. Partially because the Rohan / Dúnedain
thing I’ve been doing for the past couple of quests is thematically muddy (and
I feel like I’ve played it out) and partially because this is going to be my
last chance at Rohan in this series for a few cycles.

I also wanted this deck to be distinct from the others I built for the series so far, so I looked at which Rohan Heroes I hadn’t used yet, and one stuck out to me: Háma. He’s often maligned these days due to his famous 3x per game nerf a little while ago—which of course only serves to intrigue me more (after all, I love bucking conventional wisdom). But even more than that, he famously combos with a card that could really help me out against the hordes of Enemies that I knew this quest would throw at me: Thicket of Spears.

Okay, so maybe it’s not actually
bucking convention to build a Háma / Thicket deck—the old-school combo that got
Háma errata’d in the first place—but I had never actually tried it before
myself, and I wanted to see if it’s still viable post-errata under Nightmare
conditions. Plus, back in the day it was generally more of a multiplayer thing,
and I wanted to see if I could make it work well in solo.

Fortunately, Tactics Rohan provides two other Heroes to help me make mono-Tactics viable: Éowyn and Théoden, who quest for a combined 8 (!) willpower by themselves, right out of the gate. Unfortunately it does break a mini-goal I set out for myself in my introduction to the cycle of keeping King Théoden blissfully unaware of the machinations of Saruman—but this deck worked too well against this quest for me to let the opportunity to play it pass. C’est la vie!

Having chosen the Heroes, I filled
the rest of the deck with Rohan and Isengard Allies, as well as
just about every toolbox card that Tactics has at its disposal to help with questing.
With a little playtesting and tweaking, I was able to sharpen the deck to a
fine point.

The
play’s the thing

Win ratio: 3 / 5

It took a lot of iterating on the deck
design to get it to a point that it could pull out a 3-out-of-5 win ratio. The Antlered
Crown is a heavy burden indeed! One key breakthrough seemed to be the addition
of 3 copies of Saruman, who can solve pretty much any problem I’m having
for the cost of 1 round’s worth of resources and 3 threat. Too many Enemies?
Saruman can probably help kill a big one. Location locked? Saruman can cancel
some threat and quest for an extra 3—generally enough to get me back on my
feet. Ditto for simply questing fast and clearing the final Location. He’s a
great tempo card, giving me that one good turn I need to get ahead of the
encounter deck.

Even with the aid of the White
Wizard, I couldn’t get my footing if the encounter deck didn’t play along, at
least a little bit. In two of my three wins, my first reveal of the game was a
copy of Raising the Cry, a huge softball on the first round of the game,
simply removing a Time counter from the Location that starts in the Staging
Area. Another game gave me a timely reveal of Fierce Folk, which gave me
the breathing room I needed to clear out some Enemies I had been defending
successfully but had been unable to find the time to kill.

All it took was one gentle reveal to
give my deck the time it needed to gain the upper hand, but if I didn’t get it
in the first 6 rounds or so, I just couldn’t quite keep up. One of my losses
traced back to a single ill-timed Raven Village coming out on a turn
when its Time effect would automatically go off (no matter what I did). Its
extra Enemy put me on the back foot for the rest of the game. I fought
valiantly, but the encounter deck never relented, and I ended up falling when a
pair of Dunland Raiders engaged me from the Staging Area.

The other thing that could do me in
was a lack of access to Thicket of Spears. I could usually make do in
the early game with the likes of Feint and (when necessary) Grimbold
doing the work of keeping me safe from some of the larger Enemies. But by the
time I got to the last stage and was face-to-face with the Raven Chief and his
cronies, I needed to have a Thicket in hand. Despite the deck’s lack of card
draw, I was usually able to find a single copy by the time I needed it—but not
always!

It was fun to see how the Háma errata
made the old Háma / Thicket combo interesting to play. Once I had Thicket in
hand, should I use it, or save it? I could only bring it back 3 times—so if I
was already swarmed with Enemies I either had 3 rounds to beat the quest or I
had to find some other way of cleaning them up. More than once I had to make a
tough call where I decided to chump block some attacks without using Thicket in
the hopes that I could buy myself some more time to reach the end of the game.
There were also several times where I had to think hard about whether I was
going to burn one of my valuable Háma-returns on Feint, since it’s way cheaper than
Thicket and lets me save up resources from round to round. These sorts of
interesting choices really made Háma fun to play.

One key strategy I stumbled upon was
to never spend more than 1 round at the final Stage, because its end-of-round extra-attacks
Time effect couldn’t be canceled by Thicket (which is a Combat Action). In my
early tests against this quest, letting the (inevitably) numerous Enemies get a
bunch of free attacks on me always spelled the end of the game. For this
reason, I learned to always quest as hard as possible upon reaching Stage 3 and
save Éowyn’s ability to land the killing blow on the boss.

It didn’t come together every time,
but it was always an interesting struggle. Each round brought me tradeoffs to
weigh, and even when I managed to get the upper hand, I wasn’t sure I would win
until the final blow fell.

Final
thoughts

The Antlered Crown is certainly a
pitched battle in Nightmare mode, neatly treading the line between difficult
and punishing. It was a fun quest to master, and the deck I built to challenge
it provided me with plenty of opportunities for tactical play—a satisfying endeavor
through and through. The deck is both strong and interesting enough that I’ll
probably revisit it against other quests someday.

And with that, the Nightmare Ring-maker
cycle draws to a close. Saruman has his magic ring mould, an Orc he can use to start
building his Uruk-hai army, and the friendship of the Chief of Dunland. What
great work we have done! In my next post, I’ll be looking back on the cycle (and
its associated Deluxe) as a whole, picking apart what worked with this playthrough,
what didn’t, and how the cycle stacks up against the others that I’ve played so
far.

You have finally reached the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil, but Bellach and his Orcs have arrived before you. They appear to be searching for the hidden chamber. If you want to reach it first, you will have to move quickly and carefully…

The Ruins of Ost-in-Edhil

It has been far too long since my last blog post! I can certainly empathize with my Heroes from my last post, seemingly stuck in a vast swamp with no end in sight. But the springtime sun has reinvigorated my weary bones, and I have finally found some time to continue my adventure. Let’s explore the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil, and see if we can work out what secrets Celebrimbor kept there!

The power to scour

In the narrative of Celebrimbor’s Secret, your goal is to locate Celebrimbor’s Mould before Bellach and his Orcs do. The ring mould itself starts the game attached to The Secret Chamber in the staging area, and all you have to do to grab it is to place 3 progress on the quest, travel to the Secret Chamber, and clear it. From there you just have to make 14 total progress on the quest to move on to Stage 2. It sounds straightforward enough, but as always, there’s a catch.

You are opposed by The Orcs’ Search, an Objective that starts in the staging area and collects every Location that takes as much damage as it has quest points and raises your threat by 1 each round for every card it has collected. How do Locations take damage, you ask? Well, in addition to regular card effects like the When Revealed text of Hateful Search, most Location damage accumulates as a result of triggering all Scour effects in play. These are triggered roughly every 3 rounds as a result of a Time 3 effect on each Quest Stage.

Many Scour effects deal damage to Locations, but not all of them. Bellach, for instance, sits in the staging area all game and calls in new Orcs to do his bidding. Unfortunately, an effect on the first quest stage makes him invincible until you reach Stage 2—but in general, you’ll want to prioritize which Enemies and Locations to deal with first based on how badly their Scour effects will hurt you if they go off.

Once you have recovered the Mould and placed 14 progress on Stage 1, you get to move on to the second and final Stage.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Regardless of how sneaky you were in the first stage, Bellach catches up to you in the second and takes the Mould, forcing you to place another 12 progress on the quest before you’re finally allowed to engage and defeat the Spy from Mordor. It works fine mechanically, but I can’t help but feel like narratively it’s a little ham-fisted. After all, why did we do all of that work to beat the bad guy to the macguffin if he’s just going to take it from us and force us to fight him anyway? It feels like the Dungeon Master railroaded us.

In any case, Bellach isn’t the scariest end-boss in the game, but the Scour effects continue to trigger on a Time 3 keyword during Stage 2, so it’s usually best to make quick work of him before his Orc hoard overwhelms you. You’ll also be racing against The Orcs’ Search as it builds up and tries to threat you out. Once you’ve defeated Bellach and recovered the Mould, you can pack up for your successful return journey to Isengard to collect your reward!

With a new keyword and a few new mechanical concepts, Celebrimbor’s Secret seems kind of complicated at first, but it has a particular cadence to it. Once you get the hang of it, it actually turns out to be a pretty quick and straightforward quest.

Deck: Riding far Afield

They were tamers of beasts and had learned the mastery of horses, and many were skilled and fearless riders. These would often ride far afield as scouts and keep watch on movements of their enemies; and if the Orcs dared to assemble in the open for some great raid, they would gather great force of horsed archers to surround them and destroy them.

Inspiration

Solo Hero Elfhelm decks are a little tricky to get right, so of course I wanted to try my hand at building one for this series. My key goal here was to have three Heroes who could maximally benefit from each of Elfhelm’s stat bonuses: Spirit Éowyn for questing, Tactics Aragorn for attacking, and Elfhelm himself for defense. Once each was equipped with a Mount, their already-focused stats would be highly optimized for their intended function.

I actually built the first version of this deck quite a while ago, back when I was trying out the Dúnedain / Rohan theme for The Three Trials. While I found the core concepts of the deck to be really fun, the deck itself wasn’t quite strong enough to be able to tackle that monster of a quest. Elfhelm’s defense, for one, isn’t high enough to handle quests with aggressive starts. So I took things in a different direction.

I kept revisiting this deck for each quest thereafter, hoping I’d be able to find one for which it was a good fit. I finally found that fit in Celebrimbor’s Secret.

Well… I sort of found that fit. Truth be told, this deck still isn’t as strong as most of the decks that I build for this series. But it’s fun to play, so I’m glad I was eventually able to find a use for it.

Thematic concessions

The card We Are Not Idle has the peculiar property of being zero cost and drawing you a free card, even if you exhaust zero Dwarf Heroes. Normally, I reserve it for Dwarf decks, but with Rohan decks being so starved for card draw (and this deck doubly so) I decided I could make an exception here.

While the game text clearly references Dwarves, nothing about the title of the card is particularly Dwarf-specific. After all, none could in good faith accuse the horse-lords or the rangers of the North of idleness—so maybe it’s not so much of a stretch after all.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 3 / 6

More often than not, the biggest obstacle I had to overcome in this quest was threat, generally from having too many cards collect under The Orcs’ Search too quickly. Two of my losses could be directly attributed to early-game reveals of Closing In and not drawing into enough of my threat reduction cards. My third loss was due to threat as well, although that one may have been more as a result of not killing high-threat Enemies fast enough and failing to quest successfully a few times.

All of my wins were photo finishes, never ending with my threat dial sitting lower than 48. In two games, I only won due to holding Éowyn back from questing (or readying her with Snowmane), allowing her to contribute the final point of attack required to kill Bellach before threatting out. Apparently even her Spirit incarnation is good at boss-slaying!

In all of my games, as soon as a single card found its way under The Orcs’ Search, I knew I was on a ticking clock, desperately trying to amass enough willpower and combat prowess to complete the quest as my threat dial reeled out of control. My deck and the encounter deck were closely matched, making for several intense games that were never certain until the final action!

Final thoughts

I had a lot of fun with this one. My deck was quirky and interesting to get up and running, and the encounter deck was dynamic and challenging—but not overly so. As far as Nightmare quests go, Celebrimbor’s Secret isn’t the hardest of the bunch, which is part of why I was able to get away with a slightly less efficient deck.

I’m not worried about getting my fill of difficult quests, though, for the next quest is the grand finale of the Ringmaker cycle, The Antlered Crown! If my memory serves me correctly, the original is already plenty difficult on its own; I can only imagine what Nightmares wait for me ahead!

You’ve entered the vast marshlands of the Nîn-in-Eilph with Nalir in order to escape Bellach and his Orcs. Now, you must cross the swamp in order to reach Hollin on the other side. No traveler has entered the Nîn-in-Eilph for an age and there is no path through the shifting marshland. You must find your own way across the treacherous bog.

Fleeing from Tharbad

Others have said it before, but it bears repeating: The Nîn-in-Eilph does an excellent job at representing its narrative through its mechanics. Playing this quest feels just like trudging knee-deep through a miserable, never-ending swamp while being pursued by a terrible creature that you can’t be rid of no matter how hard you try—especially if, like me, you refuse to move on to the next quest until you have thoroughly beaten the previous one.

An effective swamp simulator

The key mechanic at play in The Nîn-in-Eilph is that there are multiple Stage 2 and Stage 3 cards. Each of those cards require between 13 and 16 progress to clear, and a nasty ability that hampers your ability to build your board state. But there’s a catch: each one also has the Time 3 keyword, and if you don’t complete it before the final time counter is removed, you lose all progress on that stage and switch to a new stage with the same number.

Unfortunately, you can’t always rely on having 3 full rounds to come up with the required progress. Treacheries like Shifting Marshland or Quicksand can remove extra time counters from the quest, making it hard to predict exactly how much time you have left. If you’re careful, you might be able to travel to a Hidden Eyot to add extra time counters, increasing your chances of making through one Stage and onto the next. If you can stomach its 3 threat in the early game, you could even choose it as one of the Locations you add to the staging area to fulfill the quest’s Setup text.

By themselves, the constantly changing quest stages might not be too bad. But there are also lots of other effects that trigger whenever the quest stage switches. Each “A” side of each quest stage forces you to raise your threat by 1, for instance. There are also a bunch of Locations that do bad things to you if they happen to be in the staging area whenever the quest stage changes.

But that’s not the worst thing that happens whenever you switch stages.

The Ancient Marsh-Dweller

Whenever you visit a new quest stage, the Ancient Marsh-Dweller enters the staging area from wherever it is—even the victory display. This means you can never really kill it, just escape it temporarily only to have it return in a few rounds whenever the quest stage rolls over again. (In the original version of the quest, it only appears for Stage 3 cards, but in the Nightmare version you have to fight it during Stage 2 as well, just for good measure).

Even though it’s always going to come back, you’re still going to want to kill the Marsh-Dweller from time to time because of its ability: it collects every time counter that gets removed from the quest and gets +1 threat and +1 attack for each. After a few rounds its threat gets too high to leave in the staging area and its attack power is too big to safely block. Killing it clears its accumulated tokens and gives you a short reprieve before the horror returns to harry you anew.

Speaking of a returning horror

As if a never-ending swamp and invincible tentacle monster weren’t enough, The Nîn-in-Eilph is the second (and thankfully final) quest featuring the Objective-“Ally” Nalir, from whom we purchased a map in the previous quest. Nalir’s useless statline and threat-raising ability remain unchanged, and you’re not even allowed to feed him to the Ancient Marsh-Dweller because if he dies you lose the game.

Put it all together, and you have yourself a challenging scenario. It’s tough on your threat dial, requires regularly fighting and killing a boss Enemy, and forces you to work around persistent negative effects to build a board state capable of producing up to 16 progress in a round or two.

What sort of deck could possibly stand against it?

Deck: Uneasy Neighbors

“I wonder now if even then Saruman was not turning to evil ways. But at any rate he used to give no trouble to his neighbours. I used to talk to him. There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen.”

Treebeard, The Two Towers

Theme: Saruman and the Ents

Hero (3)Aragorn (The Watcher in the Water)
Éowyn (The Flame of the West)
Gríma (The Voice of Isengard)

Inspiration

Most of the time, I start with an idea for my deck’s theme, choose my Heroes, and then build my decks from there. My first attempt at a theme for this quest was to continue with the somewhat muddy Rohan / Dúnedain thing I’ve been doing since The Three Trials. I tried lots of different Hero lineups, but I couldn’t get any of them to work.

The Nîn-in-Eilph constantly frustrated my attempts to build a board state strong enough to contend with both the threat in the staging area and the Ancient Marsh-Dweller. I built a few decks that dealt well with one or the other from round 1, but it consistently took too long to get to a place that I could do both—and I inevitably threated out.

One night while I was grousing to my spouse about my problems with this quest, they suggested I try Ents. After all, Ents are okay with a slow start, and they’re completely unaffected by the particular Stage 2 that forces Allies to enter play exhausted.

“That’s a good idea, but it doesn’t really follow the storyline I’ve been going with,” I said, “and thematically it’s weird to see Ents West of the Misty Mountains.” But after a few more losses I decided to replace all of the Dúnedain Allies in my current Doomed attempt at a deck with Ents just to see what would happen. And suddenly I had a problem on my hands.

Because it worked brilliantly.

So I did my best wizard impression and tried to read the deck like a palantír, divining its theme from what I saw inside. I did a little tweaking to bring that theme into focus, and with a little bit of doubling down on the Doomed cards and tossing in a single (mechanically unnecessary) copy of Saruman, ta-da! Look at that, maybe people will believe I meant to build a “Saruman and the Ents” deck from the very beginning.

It doesn’t make as much sense with the narrative of this specific quest, but, hey, I called that out as an optional goal when I started this series a few years ago. (Good thinking, past-self!)

Thematic concessions

There are still a few thematically shaky elements of the deck, though. Hero choice in an Isengard deck is always going to be a little weird with only Gríma to choose from at the moment, but Aragorn feels a little extra out of place. He’s vital to the deck’s function, though, since his threat reset allows me to use Gríma’s ability with impunity to help me get a fast start. I guess this is just another case of the Wandering Aragorn Rule. And I suppose he brought his Athelas with him (to help me cancel this quest’s Hero-killing Condition Treachery).

The other weird choice here is Elfhelm. He’s essentially a Feint-like card here, meant as a cheap way of dealing with the Ancient Marsh-Dweller’s heavy attacks without letting it destroy my board state. He’s a hold-over from the original version of the deck, and I decided to keep him since one version or another of Elfhelm has been along for the ride for most of the other quests this cycle.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 4 / 5

There’s nothing like facing a difficult quest and absolutely crushing it with a hoard of angry trees.

As it turns out, my partner was right: this deck takes a lot of the bite out of the encounter deck. Ents are fine with being forced into a slow start because they’re built to handle a slow start anyway. And because of my Booming Ents I was downright gleeful every time I revealed a copy of Low on Provisions from the encounter deck—a card which normally sends other decks into a downward spiral.

My general strategy was to leave the Ancient Marsh-Dweller in the staging area until the first stage’s time counters ran out. To help me with my questing in the early game, I chose the lowest-threat location, Sinking Bog, as my starting location. During the first few rounds, I would play as many Ents as possible, starting with Treebeard if I had him. I made liberal use of Gríma‘s ability to help me get a fast start.

Once the first quest card cycled, I would hopefully have a card in hand to prevent the Marsh-Dweller’s attack from dealing too much damage, preferably Feint, The Wizard’s Voice, or Elfhelm. Then I would engage the Marsh-Dweller, block its attack, and immediately trigger Éowyn‘s boss-killer ability to bring it down (with the help of an Ent or two).

That would buy me enough time to finish building up my Ent army in peace, and the next time the Marsh-Dweller had built up enough tokens to be annoying I would generally have enough attack power to kill it as often as I liked. Because of my liberal use of Gríma’s threat-raising ability (plus Nalir’s involuntary threat-raising ability, grr) I would always have to trigger Aragorn’s threat reset halfway through the quest—around the time I was at about 45-47. After that, it was pretty much smooth sailing.

My one loss highlights just how annoying the non-unique Enemies in the quest can be. I was on Stage 3, getting close to the end of the game. I was engaged with a single Giant Swamp Adder, which, while not terribly strong at 3 attack, gets extra attacks whenever a time counter is removed from the quest. Between killing other Enemies and having most of my Ents questing I wasn’t quite able to muster up the 9 (!) total attack required to kill it in one turn, so I figured I’d deal with it next round. When I removed a time counter from the quest at the end of the round, I tanked its extra attack with a Derndingle Warrior.

I had one Enemy engaged, two time counters on the quest, and the Marsh-Dweller was in the victory display, so I was feeling pretty good about my odds. I reserved a Derndingle Warrior, Nalir, and two Booming Ents, and sent the rest of my party on the quest, figuring that 4 characters should be plenty to tank any attacks I might have to deal with and still have some left over to do some killin’.

I was very wrong.

My first reveal: Shifting Marshland, which removes a time counter and Surges. Unfortunate, but not a big deal. I blocked the Adder’s second attack against me with the Derndingle.

Reveal #2: Also Shifting Marshland. That was a third extra attack from the Adder, which I blocked with Nalir. But the bigger problem was that the quest stage advanced due to removing the final time counter from it, bringing the Marsh-Dweller back from the victory display. That would have been fine on its own (since I could just choose not to engage it) but it also brought with it two copies of Swarms of Mosquitoes—an Enemy that returns from the victory display in the same way—that I had killed the round before.

My final encounter reveal was Quicksand, presenting me with an impossible choice: either remove another time counter from the quest and take another attack from the Adder, or remove all of my highest-willpower characters from the quest and fail by enough to raise my threat past 45—the Ancient Marsh-Dweller’s engagement cost. Either way, I was facing four more attacks before the end of the combat phase, with only two Booming Ents standing in the way.

I chose threat raise, but it didn’t really matter—I knew I wouldn’t survive. The swamp creatures descended on my party all at once and nobody made it out alive. My Heroes quickly fell to undefended attacks.

Just to add insult to injury, the Marsh Adder got the last copy of Shifting Marshland as its shadow effect, granting it a grand total of five attacks against me before the start of my next Refresh phase. That one snake could have killed my whole army all by itself!

Final thoughts

So, The Nîn-in-Eilph gave me a dramatic story to tell, which is always nice. But is it a fun quest?

Honestly? No—not really.

Just like trudging through a bug-infested swamp, the mechanics of the quest seem designed to annoy you to death. The Enemies aren’t terribly strong, they just have aggravating abilities and are hard to kill. It’s constantly erasing your progress on the quest. The damn Marsh-Dweller doesn’t stay dead. And the Objective-Ally is more harmful than he is helpful!

So, while I appreciate the ways the mechanics reinforce the narrative, I’m just not a fan of the way it actually plays out in practice. But at least now I am through the swamp and ready to tackle the next adventure, Celebrimbor’s Secret, on the other side!

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/nightmare-the-nin-in-eilph/feed/8authrawPath Less Traveled: Roam Across Rhovanionhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/01/05/path-less-traveled-roam-across-rhovanion/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/01/05/path-less-traveled-roam-across-rhovanion/#respondSat, 05 Jan 2019 02:47:19 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22257Continue reading Path Less Traveled: Roam Across Rhovanion]]>This post has sat half-finished in my drafts for quite a long time. My job got… really intense for a while there, so non-essential things (like blogging, spending time at home, and sleeping) sort of fell off of the wagon. What little free time I did manage to wrestle for myself I decided to spend with my life partner writing Dungeons & Dragons adventures for fun. Maybe I’ll talk a little more about that some other time. But suffice to say I have taken a few weeks off of work and now I can finally get this blog post out of my inbox and into the world!

As per the usual Path Less Traveled rules, I’ll be taking on Roam Across Rhovanion with a limited card pool consisting of only a single Core Set, The Wilds of Rhovanion deluxe expansion, and the first two APs of this cycle. My hiking boots are laced up, I’ve got more than enough food packed for the journey, and I’m ready to hit the open road. Let’s roam!

Haldan tight to your dreams

As always, this pack comes with a fistful of new player cards to help us along on our journey. Of particular note is that it provides the key pieces for a new Woodman archetype that focuses on placing Attachments on Locations. The primary enabler is the new Hero, Haldan. He doesn’t exhaust to quest when there’s an Attachment on the Active Location, which is nice, but his real power is that he draws you 1 card per Attachment on the Active Location whenever you clear it.

That may not seem like much at first glance—after all, how many Attachments can you really get on a single Location? But in practice, if you build around him he can be a real card draw powerhouse—especially when you take into account the fact that those Attachments were probably giving you other benefits, too.

But a single Hero doth not an archetype make. Fortunately, in addition to the Location Attachments from the previous adventure pack, Roam Across Rhovanion provides us with some new toys so we can get better use out of the shirtless Woodman.

Woodmen’s Path attaches to a Location and reduces its quest points to 1, greasing the wheels and ensuring that you can keep clearing Locations quickly to take advantage of Haldan’s abilities. Glamdring is quite possibly the strongest Guarded player card we’ve seen to date, providing a hero with +2 attack and drawing a card every time they kill an Enemy—and with Haldan on the board, if it ends up guarded by a Location you get even more benefits out of it. South Away! is an Event that switches a Location to be Active and reduces your threat by the number of Attachments on it, synergizing nicely with the rest of the pack.

While South Away! isn’t likely to make it into non-Woodmen decks, the other two can be great problem-solver cards even if you don’t build around them exclusively.

Don’t forget Dale

Of course, this pack also continues development of the newly-explored Dale archetype as well. Wiglaf is a unique Ally who lets you play an Item Attachment on him for free when you play him from your hand (synergizing with Dale‘s whole “Allies with Attachments” thing). If you’re looking for an expensive Attachment to get maximum value out of Wiglaf, you could try the new Ancestral Armor, which costs a hefty 4 but grants any Leadership or Noble character +2 defense and +2 hit points—enough to turn most characters into a sturdy super-defender for the rest of the game. And if you’re still looking for Attachments for your other Dale Allies, you can try out Wild Stallion, an Ally which becomes a Mount Attachment for any other Ally, granting them +1 to all of their stats.

Fortunately, both Ancestral Armor and the Wild Stallion are helpful outside of Dale decks, too. Both cards are great ways to build up strong defenders—something that can be difficult to do with a smaller card pool.

The Eagles are coming!

The final archetype that gets a little love in Roam Across Rhovanion is Eagles. Meneldor brings some cost-effective Location control to Tactics (something it sorely lacked up to this point) as well as sporting a useful 2 willpower for only 3 resources. Once you’ve played Meneldor from your hand, you can return him to hand using Flight of the Eagles, which allows you to shuffle an Eagle of the North into the encounter deck. There’s no guarantee that it’ll turn up during your game, but if it does, you not only get to take control of a powerful Ally but also discard an Enemy from the Staging Area.

The Eagle archetype was first introduced in the first cycle of the game, the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle, and hasn’t gotten much development since then. As a long-time player it’s nice to see some new Eagle cards after so much time. Meneldor is sure to come in handy all on his own in all kinds of Tactics decks, but Flight of the Eagles / Eagle of the North isn’t likely to find a home in any but the most dedicated of Eagle decks—it’s only a situationally useful card to begin with, and you have to draw and play an Eagle Ally before you can even consider using it.

All in all

Roam Across Rhovanion contains a mix of archetype-specific cards and general purpose cards, most (but not all) of which can be useful with a restricted card pool. It contains several unique toolbox solutions to common problems, such as Location control in Tactics, a powerful weapon in Lore, and defensive options in Leadership and Spirit.

But is it enough to help me defeat the quest?

What we’re up against

As always, I’m going to do my best to avoid story spoilers. If you’re the sort of person who also wants to avoid spoiling the quest mechanics, you can skip over the collapsed sections of this post.

Roam if you want to

This quest is pretty narrative-driven, so it’s a little hard to talk about without giving things away; if this article ends up sounding a little vague, that’s why!

Anyway, there are a total of 5 Quest Stages, the middle three of which appear in a randomized order to keep you on your toes. Fortunately, each stage is fairly simple, and most of them don’t ask much from you. You start the game with a number of Locations equal to the number of players and an Objective-Ally (with pretty good stats) who follows the first player around throughout the game.

The three middle Stages all take the form, “Add a particular Location or Enemy to play and attach a particular Objective to it. You can’t deal with that thing until you place 5 progress on the quest, but once you’ve done that, deal with the thing and claim the Objective to advance.” Each of the Objectives does something different, and most of them are double-edged swords in one way or another—helping you a little, but sometimes hurting you a little too.

The final Stage adds two boss Enemies for you to fight, both of which have pretty high attack stats and decent defensive hit point pools. They get a couple of extra attacks each round until you manage to kill them. The final stage also flips the quest phase around a bit, with the Enemies doing the questing and you trying to keep them from placing progress. If you manage to kill the bosses before they complete the final quest stage, victory is yours!

Some cards to look out for

It’s worth mentioning that there is a discrepancy between the encounter sets the quest cards tell you to use and the ones in the rules sheet—this was a misprint, and unfortunately the rules sheet happens to be correct here. That means that some of the nastier Treacheries from this cycle make an appearance here. It may be worth bringing along Condition removal to help you deal with Weighed Down, and Treachery cancellation will always be a welcome sight here.

There’s also a Location in this quest that gets me every time: Hills of Wilderland. It gets X threat, where X is the number of characters controlled by the player with the most characters—which can spell doom for a lot of decks that aren’t prepared for it. It’s worth always keeping it in the back of your mind when you’re deciding how many characters to send on the quest.

There are other curveballs to be found within the encounter deck, of course, but the quest doesn’t lean too hard on any one trick. It just applies steady pressure in all areas and forces you to stay on top of your game.

Building a deck

I haven’t had many opportunities to play the new Haldan Hero yet, so this seems like a great time to give him a spin. I’m curious to see if I can build a solo-capable control-style deck that mostly avoids combat between the new cards in this cycle and some of the Lore staples of the Core Set—primarily Denethor. With his help, I can send most of the Enemies to the bottom of the encounter deck and ensure that I see more than my fair share of Locations so that I can keep triggering Haldan’s abilities.

That little nugget of a deck idea can take me pretty far. Obviously, I’ll want all of the new Location Attachments that I can get my hands on. I can even get some use out of Power in the Earth, a Core Set card that almost never sees the light of day due to its low benefit to cost ratio. That (plus the existence of South Away!) suggests that I should include a Spirit for my number three, and since I want to be clearing Locations as often as possible I’ll once again be leaning on the awesome willpower of Core Set Éowyn.

The play’s the thing

Victory on: Normal mode

Difficulty: Reasonable

For the first several quest stages, I was able to use Denethor‘s ability to scry and manipulate the encounter deck to my great advantage, ensuring that I didn’t reveal any more Enemies than my combat-light deck could handle. I was able to stack the deck so that Haldan had enough Locations to stay fed, and once Henamarth was in play I was even able to control which cards got stuck to my Guarded Attachments (usually Locations) which spiraled into a positive feedback loop of even more power.

In other words, the deck worked exactly as planned.

Even so, my luck had worn thin by the end of the game. I had drawn through my entire deck, and I ended up having to take an undefended attack on Éowyn (killing her) in order to make it through to the end. While it was a little drawn out, the ending was tense and exciting. I was thrilled to see just how well Haldan fared—he’s better in practice than I would have thought!

Give me the details!

I managed to pull out a win on my second attempt. I had the encounter deck pretty much locked down for the first four stages of the game, only really tripping up when one of them forced me to fight a Grey Mountain Giant before I was really set up. Fortunately, I was able to use the Objective-Ally to help bolster my combat abilities and once the Giant was dead the next several stages were a walk through the park.

My biggest problem was the two bosses during the final stage. I was well set up, but with one of them getting an additional attack each round (for a total of 3 high-powered attacks) I didn’t have enough chump blockers to keep myself going for long. Unfortunately I had to sacrifice Éowyn just so I could have enough action advantage to kill both bosses, but a win is still a win!

Final thoughts

A fun and replayable quest with a moderate difficulty curve, I’ll definitely be coming back to Roam Across Rhovanion with different decks just to see how they handle it. So far the quests of this cycle have been top-notch!

As far as the player cards go, Haldan is a fun new Hero to play with as the foundation for a neat new archetype which works pretty much out of the box (and only stands to get better with more expansions). There are a few cards which won’t be as useful without an expanded collection, but most of them can be put to good use even with a small pool. Wild Stallion in particular is making its way into lots of my decks these days.

All in all, the Ered Mithrin cycle is off to a solid start. I’m curious to see how the cycle develops as we venture deeper into the heart of the mountains!

“Home is behind, the world ahead,And there are many paths to tread.”

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2019/01/05/path-less-traveled-roam-across-rhovanion/feed/0authrawA brief pause along the pathhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/a-brief-pause-along-the-path/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/a-brief-pause-along-the-path/#commentsSun, 18 Nov 2018 21:38:17 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22255Continue reading A brief pause along the path]]>Last week, I posted my first article on an adventure pack in my Path Less Traveled series, which has up until recently primarily focused on deluxe expansions. In the process of figuring out how I wanted to handle the differences between the two types of expansions, I found myself (quite unexpectedly) ruminating on the series as a whole and what I intend to accomplish with it. How have my goals changed from when I first started the series? Am I still achieving what I intend to?

Sometimes it’s easier for me to work through my thoughts in writing; this post is an artifact of that process. If this article seems to straddle the line between an essay and a letter to myself—now you know why.

The path I have walked

When I first started the series, I wrote a kickoff post explaining my reasoning. Where my Thematic Nightmare series is targeted primarily at long-time players of the game, Path Less Traveled is meant to be easily digestible by players who are just starting out with the game. But my purpose for starting the series wasn’t actually to expand my readership—after all, writing for my blog is something I do with my free time because it’s fun, not because I need the metrics. Rather, I recall wanting to test a common adage that I saw repeated in various online communities: “New expansions would probably be too hard if you played out of order.”

That sounded like an interesting hypothesis to analyze—and so the series was born. My motivation was partly scientific, partly out of a desire to assist new players, and—if I’m honest—partly contrarian (because I secretly love to disprove common wisdom).

A shift of focus

After I was several deluxe expansions in, I felt I had proved to myself that, yes, it is indeed possible to play out of order and have a good time of it. So far, only one expansion—The Lost Realm—has proven to be more hard than fun.

I needed a way to organize my findings in an easily digestible format, and from that need the top-level page was born. My goal was for that page to be something I could easily link to on forums and the like to help answer a couple of common questions that come up all the time. “Is it okay to play out of order?”, “Is X expansion beatable with just a Core Set?”, “After the Core, should I buy X expansion or Y?”, and I even threw in my answer to the evergreen “Should I buy a second Core Set?”

This page gave me a place to boil down all of the articles on a single expansion down to a short, quippy sentence or two which new players can use to hone in on whether or not a particular expansion plays well without a larger card pool. As I played through expansions, I found myself always holding the verdict in mind—and seeking out a verdict for each box became the series’ new raison d’être.

The shift is subtle, I think, but important. The series started out mostly trying to prove that a thing could be done at all; now I am more concerned with how it should be done.

The path ahead

If the purpose of the series has changed slightly, then it’s probably worth looking at the series’ form as well, to see if there are any changes that I can make to allow it to better serve that purpose.

Recently, someone online brought up a point in passing that I hadn’t thought much about before. They made an argument that went something like this: Just because a skilled veteran can beat a quest with a limited card pool doesn’t mean that a new player is going to be able to do the same.

I have on more than one occasion received the feedback that a quest that I thought was relatively easy was one that others found to be quite difficult. Sometimes, that could be chalked up to deck choice, good luck, or personal preferences, but I have begun to suspect it may also related to the 4+ years I have spent playing the same card game over and over.

So my perspective may be slanted

The last thing I would want is to mislead new players into purchasing an expansion out of the belief that they’d be able to pick it up and beat each quest on the first try or two, only to become frustrated when they find themselves running up against a wall. This game is hard, and like any skill it’s going to take practice to master. That goes double for folks new to constructed-deck card games. I don’t think most of my Path Less Traveled articles do a great job of reflecting that.

Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to accept some level of dissonance between the way new players and I experience the game. After all, I can’t un-learn what I know, and different things are going to trip up different people. But there are a two things I’m going to do to try to add some clarity to the series:

1. I’m going to stop reporting the number of tries it took me to beat a quest.

This metric was originally intended as a general indicator of difficulty. Being the engineer that I am, I love data, and “number of attempts required” was a measurable approximation of that. I always knew it was an imperfect metric, but on reflection if my target audience is new players, reporting my number of tries could actually work against giving a clear indication of what to expect. After all, what makes a lot of quests hard isn’t the raw stats that they demand, but rather figuring out the trick. And in most cases, I’m going into these quests already knowing what I need to achieve.

Instead, I’m going to abstract the difficulty of each quest into one of three buckets:

Reasonable – It’s definitely possible to beat this quest, but it may take several tries to work out how to meet the quest’s demands.

Tough – It’s possible to beat this quest, but expect to spend some time optimizing your deck. Be proud of yourself when you finally beat it!

Punishing – It may be possible to beat this quest with highly optimized deckbuilding and/or good luck, but it might be more hard than fun.

This rating will be informed by the number of attempts that I take to beat a quest, but ultimately I’m going to have to use my gut. I think in the long haul, though, it will provide a more accurate barometer of what to expect than the raw data would. Since the series is effectively one big living document, I may even go back and modify previous articles to utilize the new system.

I do some of this already both when I talk about the quest’s mechanics and when I report on my personal play experiences with it, but I think I could stand to highlight it more clearly. When I play a quest, I’m going to take a step back and try to figure out what the key problems are that the quest is posing, the ways I solved them, and other potential solutions that I could have pursued instead.

I may even go so far as to write little micro-posts on individual problems that come up often across quests (for example, enemies that attack for 6+, or too much direct damage) complete with possible solutions to those problems. We’ll have to see where the inspiration strikes me.

Anyway…

That’s a long way of saying I’m going to be experimenting a bit with the structure and content of my Path Less Traveled posts. I’ll start iterating with my next post on Roam Across Rhovanion, but I expect it will take a few tries for me to settle on something I’m really happy with.

Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts on ways I could make the series more useful!

“Home is behind, the world ahead,And there are many paths to tread.”

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/a-brief-pause-along-the-path/feed/2authrawPath Less Traveled: The Withered Heathhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/path-less-traveled-the-withered-heath/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/path-less-traveled-the-withered-heath/#commentsSun, 04 Nov 2018 20:29:43 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22220Continue reading Path Less Traveled: The Withered Heath]]>I’ve been having a lot of fun with the newest quests and player cards, so it seems like the perfect time to continue my Path Less Traveled series deep into the mountains of the Ered Mithrin cycle. Today, I’m going to venture into The Withered Heath, the first Adventure Pack, as it builds upon the story started in The Wilds of Rhovanion.

This is the first time I’ve covered an Adventure Pack in this series, which carries its own set of unique challenges. Unlike a Deluxe Expansion, Adventure Packs aren’t standalone—each one depends upon a particular Deluxe in order to complete the encounter deck. As such, my card pool for this post will consist of The Withered Heath, The Wilds of Rhovanion, and the Core Set.

Furthermore, since each Adventure Pack only contains a single quest, I’m not really going to get the opportunity to try out all (or even most) of the new player cards in any given pack—they simply won’t fit all in the same deck. This makes me hesitant to call out individual packs as “recommended” or “not recommended” purchases, since I won’t be getting enough experience with any given pack to really know its ins and outs.

Instead, I’m going to look at the cycle as a whole rather than try to parcel out which specific Adventure Packs are “worth buying” versus not. My primary question for this part of the series will be: Is the Ered Mithrin cycle fun if played as the first contiguous cycle after the Core Set? This means I’ll be using the player cards from each pack cumulatively rather than evaluating each pack as a single independent entity. That gives me a little space to try out different deck types and get a feel for the whole card pool before I make too many judgements about any given product.

So then, I’ve got my cold-weather gear all packed up, and I’m ready to begin the hunt for adventure! But before we take our first steps into the wilderness, let’s talk about the new player cards that will be accompanying me on my journey.

Beorn to be wild

The new Hero is Grimbeorn the Old, son of Beorn from the Hobbit books. He caused a fairly large splash in the LotR LCG community when he was first revealed, due to his ability to defend for 3 and then attack back immediately for what is effectively 5 at the cost of a single resource. He’s the perfect defender for mid-tier Enemies, often taking care of them all by himself. Unlike other Heroes who often need a Weapon or two to get the ball rolling, Grimbeorn is ready to go right out-of-the-box.

In addition to this beefy Hero, this pack contains a couple of cards that build towards a Beorning deck. Beorn’s Rage is an Event that subtracts 2 defense and attack from Enemies attacking or being attacked by Beornings. The defense debuff is less useful for Grimbeorn since he already subtracts defense from Enemies (and you can only go as low as zero) but the attack debuff can be great to help keep him alive against sturdier Enemies. The second Beorning card in the pack is Beorning Skin-changer, a 2-cost Ally who can be discarded to put a much more expensive Beorning Ally (like Core Set Beorn) into play.

Honestly, though, with only 1 copy of Beorn in the Core Set, there just aren’t enough Beorning cards in this small card pool to make anything other than the Hero terribly useful here. These cards are probably going to sit in the binder unless you invest in some other packs (such as Over Hill and Under Hill or The Crossings of Poros).

Fortunately, there’s a lot more in the box than just Beorning support.

Just for the Dale of it

Two Dale Allies make their debut in this pack. The Guardian of Esgaroth can play the main role in a Dale deck all on their own, getting +1 to every stat for every Attachment they collect (up to +3). A fully-buffed Guardian can serve just about any role you want them to. The Long Lake Fisherman, on the other hand, searches the top 5 cards of your deck for any one card as long as you can guess its cost. This is great for whenever you want a specific card but haven’t managed to find it yet, and could be super useful in any kind of deck—not just Dale.

Of course, Dale is nothing without Attachments for its Allies. Fortunately, The Withered Heath has us covered. Squire’s Helm can go on any Ally, granting them +2 hit points, boosting their vitality enough to ensure they don’t fold to a wayward Treachery or Shadow Effect. The Grey Cloak is a little more niche, going on any Scout or Spirit character and allowing them to exhaust to prevent an Enemy from engaging you.

Neither Attachment is going to set the world on fire, but they’re both good additions to the Dale deck, providing cheap ways to trigger all of those Attachment-related boosts.

A little taste of what’s to come

The Withered Heath also includes a few cards clearly pointed at an archetype that won’t really be developed until the next pack: the Woodman deck, which get bonuses for playing Attachments on Locations. Fortunately, these cards can be pretty useful outside of a dedicated Woodman deck, too.

Woodmen’s Clearing attaches to a Location and reduces the first player’s threat by 3 when that Location is explored—a great effect that’s easy to trigger for zero-cost in Lore. As cheap threat reduction, I imagine this card will see a lot of play in different kinds of decks. If you are more likely to be able to handle a Location than something else that might come off of the encounter deck, you can use The Hidden Way to ensure that that’s exactly what you’ll get. At 2 Lore resources, it can be a little pricey, but sometimes it could be well worth it to buy yourself an extra round of relative peace when you’re still trying to get set up.

The final card in the box, The Arkenstone, follows up on the new Guarded player card mechanic. It brings either an Enemy or Location into play, but once you clear that obstacle it grants a +1 willpower bonus to all of your Unique characters. I’m curious if all of these Guarded player cards are also going to be a boon for the new Woodman archetype—but I suppose we won’t know until it develops more.

In short

From a minimum-purchase standpoint, The Withered Heath is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to player cards. The Hero is great all by himself, but the retinue of Beorning-focused cards are going to fall a little flat without some additional financial investment. Dale gets a fair amount of development here, and fortunately most of the cards that make Dale better can be used in other kinds of decks too. And there’s a little bit of preparation for the new Woodman archetype that we’re all hoping to see come online soon—but these cards can make themselves useful in the meantime as well.

In all, I’d say that the good general purpose cards (Grimbeorn the Old, Long Lake Fisherman, and Woodmen’s Clearing) make the pack well worth the purchase.

But the player cards are only half the story. How does the quest play?

What we’re up against

As always, I’m going to do my best to avoid story spoilers. If you’re the sort of person who also wants to avoid spoiling the quest mechanics, you can skip over the collapsed sections of this post.

Give me a sign

This quest brings back the Deep keyword and the Caves Deck, both of which were introduced in The King’s Quest. Just like before, whenever you travel to a Location with the Deep keyword, you discard it and travel to a card from the Caves Deck instead. As usual, Deep Locations tend to be pretty scary while they’re sitting in the Staging Area, and Locations from the Caves deck tend to do something nasty as soon as they become Active.

This time, however, several Clue Objectives with the Guarded keyword have been shuffled into the Caves Deck in addition to the standard handful of Locations. These Clues are key to advancing the quest: you need 1 Clue to clear Stage 1, and you need 3 Clues to clear Stage 3. Several encounter cards also scale based on the number of Clues you have claimed, too, providing a natural escalation.

Stages 2 and 4 have you fight a big boss Enemy. It swings pretty hard (6 attack) and Quest effects limit the amount of damage you can do to it each round. This means that when the boss is in the Staging Area, you’re going to need to be able to continually tank it for several rounds while you work up to getting enough damage on it—no one-shot kills allowed. After killing it during Stage 2 and again during Stage 4 (it heals during Stage 3 at a steady rate) the Heroes are victorious and the game is won.

Building a deck

When I’m playing a Deluxe box for this series, I usually build 3 slightly different decks, allowing me to spotlight the various player cards in different ways. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to do the same thing here. Instead, I’m going to have to pick only a handful of the player cards to use. Maybe I can try the others out later in the cycle.

I don’t think I want to lay down any hard-and-fast rules for myself about which cards from each Advanture Pack I will use and which ones I’ll leave behind, but I think most of the time I’m going to want to try to use the new Hero. In this case, that means Grimbeorn. Unfortunately I don’t think I have enough Beorning cards to make good use of the Beorning Skin-changer, but at least I can throw in a few speculative copies of Beorn’s Rage to help Grimbeorn out of a pinch.

I can use a lot of the other cards from this pack if I build a Dale deck. That lets me bring in the two new Dale Allies and the two new Ally-focused Attachments, which can be pretty easily folded into the archetypal base laid out by The Wilds of Rhovanion.

That actually fills the deck up almost all the way to 50, so all I have to do is make a little room for some Core Set staples (Gandalf for card draw, Feint to help deal with early game Enemies, and A Test of Will for emergency Treachery cancellation). The deck almost builds itself!

Here’s what the finished product looks like. Notice how few Core Set cards are actually needed to make it work:

The play’s the thing

Victory on: Normal mode

Difficulty: Reasonable

My winning game went on a little longer than I might have liked, but the encounter deck did manage to slowly wear down my early control over the board leading to a tense finish. Grimbeorn was super helpful in the early game, allowing me to defend and kill small Enemies with only a single Hero action. I definitely would have liked a little more card draw, because my deck stalled out towards the end. The win was solid, although I don’t know how many more rounds I could have survived!

Give me the details!

The biggest problem I had was building up some reliable defenders to be able to tank the boss round after round. For most of the game, the best I could come up with was a pair of Redwater Sentries each equipped with a Squire’s Helm, which worked okay—but wasn’t really enough to fully tank the boss’ 6 attack multiple times. Furthermore, the boss has an ability which prevents your defender from readying until the end of the round, which meant I couldn’t reliably use those Sentries to defend attacks from other Enemies either. I ended up being forced to chump block more often than I liked.

It took me until the end of the game to actually build up a decent defender in the form of a Guardian of Esgaroth with a Hauberk of Mail, Squire’s Helm, and Map of Rhovanion attached, bringing him up to a hearty 5 defense and 6 hit points—but I still had to contend with the boss’ ability that prevented him from readying, meaning I was still chumping every other round until I could finally take out the boss.

The surprise MVP of the deck turned out to be Grey Cloak, a card which I had pretty much dismissed when I first opened the pack. I threw it on a North Realm Lookout, who doesn’t exhaust to quest (and therefore would be ready to use the Cloak should the need arise). It turned out to be vital for my survival on one round when both the boss and a Snow-troll showed up, and I was ill-prepared to deal with both of them at once. I happily exhausted the Lookout, discarded the Cloak, and prevented the Troll from engaging me. I was able to hold back more characters from the quest the next turn in full knowledge that I would need to be dealing with two big Enemies at once.

The quest had its ups and downs, with me feeling in control at some points and then feeling that control slipping through my fingers at others as the boss completely destroyed my board state. After a somewhat drawn-out game (owing mostly to the fact that you can’t deal more than a few damage to the boss each round) I was finally able to escape The Withered Heath with my life.

Final thoughts

This quest takes a little longer to play than I would like, but it’s still an interesting challenge. It’s definitely beatable with player cards from just the Core Set, The Wilds of Rhovanion, and The Withered Heath, but it does sport a host of difficult challenges that can cause a good run to turn bad quickly.

The new player cards are useful and powerful, and—while there are a few duds for a limited card pool—most of them would prove versatile and useful in many different deck types.

In all, The Withered Heath is a good start to the Ered Mithrin cycle. But I’ve got a long way to go before I can rest my weary head—Roam Across Rhovanion beckons me onward!

“Home is behind, the world ahead,And there are many paths to tread.”

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/path-less-traveled-the-withered-heath/feed/4authrawGrimbeorn-the-OldThe-ArkenstoneLimited Collector’s Editionhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/limited-collectors-edition/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/limited-collectors-edition/#commentsWed, 24 Oct 2018 03:59:15 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22163Continue reading Limited Collector’s Edition]]>A month or so ago, my Limited Collector’s Edition came in the mail. Meant as a cross-promotion between the physical and digital editions of the Lord of the Rings Card Game, as well as a collector’s piece for hardcore fans of the physical game, this product tries to do a lot of things at once.

It’s a limited edition product, so it probably won’t be reprinted once it runs out of stock—but as I write this, it’s still available directly from FFG’s website, so it’s worth taking a closer look. Was it worth the hefty $100 (plus shipping) pricetag?

Here’s what you get

The Collector’s Edition is a bundle with lots of different components:

The outer box pictured above

A playmat depicting the map of Middle Earth

A metal replica of The One Ring

Four postcard-sized art prints

A code for the soundtrack from the digital card game

A physical Two Player Limited Edition Starter, which itself is composed of:

Two prerelease Heroes that will appear in future products

Two preconstructed player decks that use a different card layout with full-bleed art

Two new quests that also use a different card layout with full-bleed art

The new-style smaller threat trackers and tokens

A code for the Mithril Pack of the the digital game

There’s quite a bit in here! If you add up the total theoretical MSRP for each of these individual pieces, it probably would come out to at least $100. It certainly seems like a good deal.

However, just because it’s worth the price tag on paper doesn’t mean it’s actually worth that much to any given individual. If I wouldn’t have normally purchased all of the constituent parts of the bundle on their own, then the only value I actually extract from it is the sum of the parts I would have paid for had they been sold separately.

So let’s go over each of the parts of the bundle one by one to see if we can separate the gold from that which merely glitters, shall we?

The box

It’s a little weird to talk about a product’s packaging, but in this case it’s actually a really nice feature. The box itself is simply decorated, but lovely, and even contains a stylized depiction of the trees of Valinor for extra theme points.

Before I received the product, I was hoping to craft an insert that would allow me to use the box to store encounter cards. Upon its arrival, however, I discovered that the box is a little too short to fit cards without storing them at a harsh angle—it just wasn’t going to work for that purpose. Fortunately, I found another use for the box: as a place to store my many accumulated playmats.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

Probably not. I didn’t really need a storage solution for my playmats—and honestly they take up more space now than they did rolled up and stuffed into the shelf next to my cards. But it sure is pretty, and now that I have found some use for it I’m reluctant to get rid of it.

Playmat map of Middle Earth

The included playmat is similar to last year’s Fellowship event playmat in that it depicts a map of Middle Earth. There are a few differences between the two: this one is deeper gold, with darker colors, has a thicker banner along the bottom (it uses the logo from the digital game rather than the physical one) and it’s a little more zoomed in than the other map.

I slightly prefer the Fellowship Event version, I think. The Collector’s Edition one feels just a little cramped at the top and bottom, and the footer has too much dead space in it. Both are nice, though, and nothing beats using a map playmat when I’m sharing the game with others so that I can point out where we are, grounding the experience even more in the lore of Middle Earth.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

No, because it’s not different enough from the playmat I already had. However, if I didn’t already have a playmat depicting the map of Middle Earth, this one would certainly be worth owning.

The One Ring

I’ll be frank: the One Ring replica is cheap. It has a little heft to it, which is nice—but there are a number of problems with it.

For one, there’s a big ugly copyright symbol printed at the end of the text (pictured above) which really breaks the immersion. Even worse, the text is printed really close to the edge of the ring, making it look off-center and even cut off in places. Finally, the circumference of the ring is so large that a big portion of the band is just blank.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

No. I have often considered buying a replica One Ring in the past to use as a first player token, but still haven’t pulled the trigger on it after all these years. If I did, I’m sure I could easily find something higher quality for a reasonable price.

The art prints

These four prints are of the four Heroes who used to be the Starter Set Heroes from the digital game, before Frodo was replaced by an invented character named Tom Took. The prints are on cardstock and are roughly postcard-sized, but the backs are blank.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

No. I have no idea what I am going to use these for.

The soundtrack

I gave the full soundtrack a listen when I first started writing this article. It’s mostly unassuming background music. A few of the tracks grated, since I’ve spent too much time with them already in the digital game (that darn shop screen music), but overall it’s a fine soundtrack. It’s a little forgettable, perhaps, but that’s often a good quality for video game music to have—otherwise it gets annoying.

I could see myself adding some of these tracks to a Lord of the Rings playlist as a little background music for playing the physical game or Cubicle 7’s The One Ring or Adventures in Middle Earth.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

Probably not. I might as well use the tracks since I have them, but it’s certainly not something I would have gone out of my way to purchase.

The Two-Player Limited Edition Starter

Let’s face it—most of that other stuff is just the pretty packaging around this—the real draw of the product. Let’s take a look at what’s inside!

Prerelease Heroes

There are two new Heroes included in this box that aren’t yet available elsewhere: Tactics Thorin Stonehelm and Leadership Gildor Inglorion. Both Heroes are pretty simple; Thorin aids the Dwarf mining archetype a bit and spreads some direct damage around, while Gildor provides some Noldor presence in the Leadership sphere and grants it some much needed card draw.

Neither Hero is going to set the world on fire, but they’re both welcome additions to the card pool.

I don’t really like it when promo cards directly affect the meta by including new game text, but at least these two are slated for general release in regular products later. These Heroes certainly don’t make the Two-Player Starter worth it all on their own, but a pair of prerelease characters is at least a nice touch for a Collector’s Edition.

Alternate layout player decks

Included in the box are two dual-sphere player decks constructed from pre-existing cards drawn from various expansions across the product’s life.

These decks contain extra copies of a few Core Set staples—most notably two of Unexpected Courage. If sold on their own, these decks could be a good way to fill in a single-Core collection without paying a premium for more Core sets. It’s worth noting, however, that they don’t 100% fill in the gaps, so if you’re a hard-core completionist you’d need to pick up an extra two Core Sets anyway.

Most notably, these player cards have an all-new layout unique to this product, meant to show off the card art:

I do like that the HP stat has been moved closer to the art, since that’s where I actually put my damage tokens. It’s also nice that the sphere icon is in the same place across all card types.

But beyond that, I don’t like new layout. For most of the cards (except Attachments, for some reason) the text box runs all the way to the right edge of the card with no border, making it look more like a printing mistake than an art decision. Events have their names printed sideways in a way that extends far above the text box, and it looks really strange. Most of the cards feel off-center and lopsided in one way or another as a result of these changes.

Even worse, a lot of the art itself is cropped in really strange ways. Some of the cards are zoomed in so close that the art gets cut off and looks sloppy:

Other cards are visually unbalanced, with the characters feeling crowded by empty space:

Still others have had key details cropped out, leaving it somewhat unclear what exactly it is we’re looking at. Particularly bad is Nori, whose mug of ale has gone mysteriously missing. Now, he just looks like he’s drooling because he was just hit in the back of the head with a shovel:

To be fair, a small number of cards actually look nicer in the new format. The best example of this is Unexpected Courage, which reveals several interesting details that get a little lost in the original card:

But, with a small number of exceptions, most of the player card art is either lateral move from the originals, or looks worse than it did in the standard layout. There are probably a number of reasons for this. For one, the original art simply wasn’t commissioned with this particular layout in mind, so when they extended it to the edges of the card they had to sacrifice large swathes of the piece to make it fit. I also have my suspicions that, given that this product was expected to have limited appeal, FFG may not have wanted to spend too much time on layout.

Whatever the reason, the new player cards feel cramped and unprofessional, which is a huge disappointment for a premium product.

Two new quests

In addition to the player cards, the box also contains two new quests (split across three encounter sets) that, to date, cannot be found in any other product. These quests are made up of a mix of preexisting encounter cards pulled from various expansions, with a few new cards thrown in as well.

These cards also have new layouts that make use of full-bleed artwork:

Unlike the player cards, however, I feel like the extended artwork works well here. I still don’t like the layout choice of cropped-off text boxes, but the zoomed-in art itself looks great. The same layout choices that make the player cards feel sloppy make the encounter cards feel immersive. This is, I think, due to a difference in function: it’s okay if the images of goblins, spiders, and other nasties are cramped, in-your-face, and unsettling. It reflects the evil nature of the servants of Mordor.

The quests themselves are straightforward, well designed, and enjoyable. The first quest, The Oath, is pretty easy and has become my go-to quest for teaching new players the game since I much prefer it to the sometimes-swingy Passage Through Mirkwood. The second quest, The Caves of Nibin-dûm, is a little tougher and plays through several interesting story beats—I’ll probably use it as a deck-tester in the future.

It feels a little cheap that there are so many recycled encounter cards in these quests, but at the same time the quests themselves are well-designed, and contain enough fresh content to make them unique and interesting. It’s even kind of fun to see the return of some old “friends” like Watchful Eyes, Caught in a Web, and the Cave Torch.

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

Probably, yes. That’s largely due to the fact that I’m such a completionist. In reality, the only components I really would have wanted would be the beautiful new encounter cards and quests. The included mini trackers, phase aid card, and prerelease Heroes are all nice perks, I suppose, but I don’t think the alternate layout player cards will see any use at my table.

To someone less dead-set on getting everything this game has to offer, this box would be an optional purchase, heavily dependent on its price tag.

The Mithril Pack for the digital game

The other major component of the Collector’s Edition, the box also contains a code for the Mithril Founder’s Pack, the most expensive entry point into the digital card game (confusingly titled Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game). There are several different price points that allow you to play the early access version of the game, with the cheapest pack being $8 and this one costing $48. The difference between the packs is in the number of cosmetic items (card backs, avatars), valor cards (unlockable player cards), and valor points (the in-game currency) that you start with.

The game used to have this whole complicated free-to-play economy, but Fantasy Flight Interactive recently announced that they’re doing away with it in favor of a more traditional pay-for-content model. It’s a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned, although we still don’t know exactly how much the retail game will cost once it leaves Early Access.

As for the game itself, it’s fun enough, I suppose—the voice acting is impressive (but not perfect) and the storytelling is fun, if a bit cheesy at times. It’s a decent reimagining of the physical game for a new medium, with some compelling new mechanics to streamline the experience. Now that they’re fixing the economy, my biggest complaint is the game’s lack of balance. It’s fairly trivial to get a perfect score on hard mode once you’ve learned how the scoring system works. I’ve been able to do this with various sphere combinations and with the starter deck, too—so the problem runs deeper than there just being a few overpowered cards.

I also wish that the deckbuilding were more interesting. With the physical card game, I’m constantly dreaming of new and interesting ways to combine card effects and produce synergies. In the digital game, card effects seem simpler and there’s less to dream about. It feels like some level of important complexity was lost in the translation.

Hopefully they’ll be able to continue to tweak and tune the balance issues throughout the Early Access period, though, and turn this compelling first try into something really fun. FFI has already shown that they’re quite responsive to feedback, which is awesome!

Would I have bought it if sold separately?

Before the Collector’s Edition came out, I was already planning to go all-in on the Mithril Pack of the digital game. This was primarily because I wanted to bypass the confusing free-to-play economic model they had set out for the game at the time.

Now that I’ve played the game, I don’t feel like I’m getting $48-worth of entertainment out of it. A large part of that is the nature of Early Access—after all, the game is far from finished. But there’s also a part of me that feels curmudgeonly about paying money to do what is essentially QA testing—something people usually get paid to do, rather than the other way around. Maybe I just don’t like the Early Access business model altogether.

Even so, the game is getting better with each passing week. Maybe one day it will be worth the price I paid for it. I guess I just have to wait and see.

All that glitters is not gold

So, in the end, of all the multifarious bits and bobs that came with the Collector’s Edition set, the only part of it that I really enjoyed was the Two-Player Limited Edition Starter—and of that, only the encounter cards. So even though the whole package came with over $100 worth of physical and digital goods, I only got a couple of quests for my money.

Ultimately, this is my biggest problem with bundled products; unless you actually want everything in the bundle, you end up spending significantly more than the value you extract from it.

Taken as a whole, I found the Collector’s Edition to be a significant let-down. It feels like a hastily designed product—much of which simply repackages existing content. An uncharitable person might even call it an attempt to squeeze easy money out of a loyal fanbase. I honestly can’t say that I would recommend it to anyone other than completionists with a lot of money to burn.

This particular blog post has been stuck in my queue for a while. That’s partly due to external life stuff: my job got busy, I moved further North, and I attended Con of the Rings. But another reason is that, at the end of the day, I didn’t like this product—in a way I don’t think I’ve disliked an LotR LCG product before. It’s been a bit of a downer to work through, to be honest, and I’m looking forward to getting back to writing about all of the amazing stuff this game has to offer that I actually enjoy.

If you’re one of the many folks who said they liked the Collector’s Edition, then I’m happy for you! Enjoy your purchase. But for my own part, I think it’s time to drop the alt-layout cards into a dark deckbox somewhere and move on.

After all, new adventures await!

Next on Darkling Door…

I’ll be returning to my Path Less Traveled series to play The Withered Heath in minimum-purchase mode! It will be the first time I tackle an Adventure Pack (rather than a Deluxe Expansion) for the series; I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes!

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/limited-collectors-edition/feed/4CE_HeaderauthrawIMG_20180828_185507_smallerPlaymatsInBoxIMG_20180828_185808Playmat_ComparisonIMG_20180828_190059Ring_HandArt_Prints.jpgAlbum_Covertwo_player_starter.jpgPerfectScorePath Less Traveled: The King’s Questhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/path-less-traveled-the-kings-quest/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/path-less-traveled-the-kings-quest/#commentsTue, 28 Aug 2018 04:21:50 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22140Continue reading Path Less Traveled: The King’s Quest]]>Having traveled the lengths of the The Wilds of Rhovanion, my Path Less Traveled has set The King’s Quest before me. Unlike the first two quests of the box, this one doesn’t have a spiritual successor from the Core Set—it sets out in its own direction entirely, taking us to a place in Middle Earth we have not seen before in the game!

Let’s find out if it’s possible to complete this quest armed with only Wilds and a Core Set. Once I’ve done that, I’ll share my thoughts on the Wilds of Rhovanion as a whole. Onward, to victory or death!

What we’re up against

As always, I’m going to do my best to avoid story spoilers. If you’re the sort of person who also wants to avoid spoiling the quest mechanics, you can skip over the collapsed sections of this post.

Looking in all the wrong places

The King’s Quest introduces the Deep keyword, found on several of the Locations in the quest. Whenever you travel to one of these Locations, you discard it from play and replace it with the top Location from the set-aside Caves deck instead. This simulates combing the mountains as you search for evil creatures—you’re never certain what any given cave contains until you’re already deep inside it.

What makes this mechanic interesting is that, for the most part, Deep Locations do something bad to you as long as they’re in the Staging Area, while Locations from the Caves deck have a (usually bad, but occasionally useful) Forced effect that triggers while they’re the Active Location. You have incomplete information while traveling, and you have to weigh the advantages of getting a Location out of the Staging Area against the unknowns of the Caves deck.

The first Quest Stage is all about these Deep Locations—you can only advance after exploring 3 Locations from the Caves deck. Furthermore, at the start of each Quest phase you have to discard from the top of the encounter deck until you find a Location and either put it into play or raise your threat by its threat. This ensures you won’t get stuck waiting around for the encounter deck to feed you Deep Locations—but it also makes Location lock a very real threat in the early game.

Once you’ve cleared the first Stage, you locate the boss Enemy that you’ve been searching for—but you’re not allowed to kill them yet! They’re added to the Staging Area and get a free attack against each player every time you explore the Active Location—which is unfortunate, since in order to clear the second Stage you have a special Location that gets added to the bottom of the Caves deck. The Quest card does throw you a bit of a bone, though, allowing you to remove 5 progress from the quest to look at the top couple of cards of the Caves deck, placing an unwanted Location on the bottom of the stack.

Once you reach Stage 3, you’re finally allowed to kill the Boss. They still get extra attacks every time you clear a Location, so it can sometimes be useful to leave Locations in the Staging Area instead of traveling to them. You can’t ignore the Quest phase altogether, though, because for every attacker that you declare against the Boss, you have to discard a progress from the main Quest! I absolutely love it when Quests are designed such that progress during the Questing Phase is relevant during the Combat Phase—it really keeps you on your toes, even when the focus is on facing a tough Enemy.

If you can kill the Boss, victory is yours! Head back to the King to collect your reward (and remove the quest marker from your journal).

Building a deck

This quest is probably going to require a strong deck, so I don’t want to do anything too gimmicky. I could go back to the Dale deck I built for Journey Up the Anduin and I’m sure it would do well here, but I also want to at least try something a little different.

As with any good Dale deck, I’ll start with Bard son of Brand and Brand son of Bain as the backbone. Along with King of Dale, they let me include all of the Dale Allies and Item Attachments from The Wilds of Rhovanion without needing to worry about resource matches.

For Journey Up the Anduin I used Beravor as my third Hero, but this time I’m going to try using a Spirit Hero instead. With two Spirit Heroes in my lineup I should have no problem playing King of Dale as soon as I draw it—as early as turn 1 if I’m lucky enough to find it in my opening hand. Losing access to all of that card draw is a tough pill to swallow, but Éowyn should help to make up for the tempo hit by at least covering my bases during the Quest Phase during the early game.

The other advantage that Éowyn affords me is that I can include some of the more expensive Spirit cards. Between having two Spirit Heroes and the extra resources from Traffic from Dale I should have no problem affording The Galadhrim’s Greeting or Northern Tracker.

I’m still going to need some extra card draw to keep my engine going—in practice I haven’t found Brand’s innate ability to be nearly enough. Unfortunately, I don’t have many options in a Spirit / Leadership deck, but I can at least scrounge up a couple of copies of Valiant Sacrifice and Gandalf. He’s expensive, but worth it in the long run if his extra cards give me the kick-start I need to get the Dale engine going.

The finalized deck is still a veritable rainbow of cards, but with its greater focus on Spirit it definitely looks different from my first Dale deck. Let’s give it a spin and see how it plays!

The play’s the thing

Attempts: 4

Victory on: Normal mode

My first attempt was actually with a different (and much jankier) deck, but for my other three games I quickly switched to the deck listed above. This was a pretty tough quest—especially as a solo player—but the Dale archetype was definitely up to the challenge. It took a couple of tries, but once I was able to establish my footing I was able to hold my ground for the rest of the quest. It’s the hardest quest from the box, but it presents an interesting challenge and a good time!

Give me the details

My first loss was the result of Location lock. Between revealing Locations normally during the Quest Phase and the extra Locations from the Forced effect on the first Quest Stage, I just wasn’t able to keep up. My threat soared, I was no longer able to quest successfully, and I eventually threatted out. My second loss was similar, but with the added complication of a pair of Stone-trolls who took advantage of my soaring threat to engage me and pummel my Heroes into dust.

For my third game, I lucked into a slightly softer start, with my first reveal of the game being a small Enemy rather than yet another Location. In addition, I was able to use a Northern Tracker plus a Snowbourn Scout to clear something out of the Staging Area on a pivotal turn, giving me the breathing room I needed to make it past the first Stage and onto the second. That turned out to be the break I needed.

I stalled for a few rounds on Stage 2, using Snowbourn Scouts to chump block attacks from the Boss and then bringing them right back again using Stand and Fight. Once I had built up my board state, I allowed myself to advance to the final stage to fight the Boss. By that point, I had a strong enough questing presence that I didn’t always need to travel to Locations anymore, allowing me to avoid the extra attacks from the Boss. It took several rounds, but eventually my Warriors of Dale wore the Boss down, securing my victory.

It was a hard-won fight, but that just made it all the more satisfying once I finally completed it. This quest manages to make the decision of whether or not to travel to Locations pretty interesting—not many quests can say that!

The final verdict

That concludes my Path Less Traveled play through The Wilds of Rhovanion! So, is it a fun expansion when played with nothing other than a Core Set? Absolutely. Would I recommend it to new players who had other options?

I’m not quite sure

As much as I think Wilds is a great box, it does feel like it’s built more for veterans than beginners. There are several reasons for this.

The callbacks to Core Set quests are great nostalgia pieces for old grognards such as myself—but that would be lost on someone who just played the Core Set. I don’t think that new players would find these quests boring or repetitive—they add enough of their own flair to stay interesting—but it might not do as good a job as some other expansion at showing the thematic breadth that this game has to offer.

More importantly, though, there are a bunch of little gotchas to be found within these quests that require a deep and clear understanding of the rules. Veterans have by now mastered the nuances of the word “then”, the difference between “revealing” versus “adding” encounter cards, and understand the timing differences between Guarded and Guarded (X). These concepts are not necessarily intuitive, though, and several of these quests will play very differently if you don’t get these right. Some new players might appreciate the opportunity crisp up on these mechanics, but others might find them confusing, especially if they’re still trying to master other concepts at the same time.

Furthermore, the prototypical Dale deck—while clearly powerful and fun to play—isn’t something I’d hand to a beginner. It breaks the sphere matching rules in multiple ways that could easily make it hard to remember how the actual rules are supposed to work. Even I get confused sometimes and try to use Bard to pay for non-Item Attachments, or try to include off-sphere Events only to realize that I can’t play them. If my first attempt at deckbuilding were a Dale deck, I’m not sure I would come away with an understanding of sphere balance—or even how sphere matches are supposed to work.

So, what it boils down to is this

The Wilds of Rhovanion is really fun with just a Core Set, but requires a nuanced understanding of the rules. If you have a firm grasp on the rules, you’ll probably be fine. If you’re not sure you’re playing everything right yet, this box could feel frustrating or discouraging.

Final thoughts

With The Wilds of Rhovanion behind me, I now find myself surveying the field, trying to choose a path to follow next. I expect my Collector’s Edition to arrive any moment now (…right UPS? …Right?) so I’ll probably write about that—and possibly something about the Digital Lord of the Rings Card Game as well.

From there, I think I’ll move on to The Withered Heath as my first Adventure Pack ever in the Path Less Traveled series, since it sounds like a fun challenge to try to keep up with the current meta.

Until next time!

“Home is behind, the world ahead,And there are many paths to tread.”

]]>https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/path-less-traveled-the-kings-quest/feed/3authraweowynhill-trollAbandoned-VillagePath Less Traveled: Lost in Mirkwoodhttps://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/path-less-traveled-lost-in-mirkwood/
https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/path-less-traveled-lost-in-mirkwood/#commentsTue, 21 Aug 2018 03:25:03 +0000http://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/?p=22056Continue reading Path Less Traveled: Lost in Mirkwood]]>As I wander along my Path Less Traveled, I suddenly find myself Lost in Mirkwood. The second quest of the Wilds of Rhovanion box echoes the first quest of the Core Set both thematically and mechanically. The major difference is that Passage Through Mirkwood sometimes plays like a tutorial, while Lost in Mirkwood is much harder.

But how much harder is it, exactly? Can it be defeated with nothing more than a Core Set and The Wilds of Rhovanion? Or would I be forced to wander down to my local Game Store to buy more cards?

Let’s search for the answer together!

What we’re up against

As always, I’m going to do my best to avoid story spoilers. If you’re the sort of person who also wants to avoid spoiling the quest mechanics, you can skip over the collapsed sections of this post.

I’m so lost without you

Lost in Mirkwood takes the idea of branching quest paths to the nth degree: there are two different choices for each of the Stages 2 through 4. Each one has an “A” version and a “C” version. Which of the two versions you visit is determined whenever you travel to one of the Quest’s four Objective-Locations. Finding and traveling to one of these Objective-Locations is the only way to advance between Quest Stages. (It’s also worth noting that when these Locations say to advance to the “next” Stage with a particular letter, you always increase the Stage number—many people play this wrong the first time and find themselves in an unwinnable state).

Since it’s so important to find these Objective-Locations, the quest provides a way for you to locate them in the form of Searching for a Way Out, an Objective that uses progress made against the main Quest to help you dig one out. It’s not all helpful, though, since Seaching for a Way Out also makes Objective-Locations and the cards guarding them immune to player card effects like the one on Northern Tracker.

Stage 2 turns out to be really important, because it sets the tone for the entire rest of the quest by shuffling one of two set-aside encounter sets into the encounter deck. One sends you too far North, pitting you against the exhaustion-inducing effects of the Spiders of Mirkwood. The other sends you too far South, pitting you against the direct-damage dealing Dol Guldur Orcs. Each of these encounter sets has a slightly different mechanical focus, changing the way you have to address the remainder of the Quest.

Each playthrough of this Quest is going to feel a little different depending on which Stages you end up encountering. Some Stages demand more combat prowess, while others put pressure on you in other ways. There are a lot of secrets hidden under the boughs of Mirkwood. You never know exactly what you might find—or what might find you—there.

Building a deck

I’ll be honest—the Dale archetype is so strong that I could probably re-use the deck I built last time and crush this quest with it. But I want to test out a theory, so I’m going to go a different direction for this one.

My theory is that the cards from The Wilds of Rhovanion are great additions to the Core Set even if you don’t build around the Dale archetype.

So I’m instead going to focus on what these cards can do for a different Core Set Hero: Dúnhere. His ability to attack into the Staging Area is pretty unique, but he can be hard to make work with a small card pool (especially in Solo) because of his relatively low attack score of 3. He definitely needs a Weapon or two to be more effective at what he does, but the Core Set only offers the pricey Dwarven Axe or the unreliable Blade of Gondolin. The Wilds of Rhovanion adds a third Weapon into the mix in the form of Bow of Yew.

Another problem is that none of those Weapons are in-sphere for Dúnhere, meaning that he’s traditionally paired with a Tactics Hero. But neither Dúnhere nor your standard Tactics Hero are good at questing, leaving you pigeonholed into a strong quester like Éowyn for your third Hero. That deck can work just fine, but it would be nice if there were other options. Enter Bard son of Brand, who can grant access to Tactics Weapons without the need for a Tactics Hero. Paring him with Dúnhere leaves the third Hero slot wide open!

Another problem Dúnhere has is just how reliant he is on getting those Weapons early. When he has them, he can do fine, but the longer he has to wait to find them, the higher his threat gets, and the less likely it is that there are still Enemies left in the Staging Area. With my third Hero slot open to anyone I like, I’m free to choose Beravor to help super-charge my Dúnhere deck and get him the Weapons he needs to be successful, as soon as possible.

This leaves me with a Spirit / Lore Dúnhere deck, something of a novelty for a deck type that has been locked into Spirit / Tactics for so long. With two Spirit Heroes, I can have access to some of the more expensive Spirit Allies, which will help my questing along somewhat, and with access to Lore I should have no problem locating the cards that I need.

The play’s the thing

Attempts: 1

Victory on: Normal mode

This was a really fun game! Beravor retrieved two Weapons by round 3, getting me up to peak efficiency pretty quickly. I was almost sad when I won on the first try—I had a good time with this quest and if I had reserved time for more than a trial run that night I would have happily given it a few more goes.

Give me the details!

My threat climbed a little faster than I would have liked in the early game (although that’s pretty normal for this quest, since Stage 1 has some threat-raising effects and prevents you from lowering your threat). This reduced Dúnhere’s effectiveness somewhat, although thanks to The Galadhrim’s Greeting and Gandalf I was able to get it back down below 35 for the whole game, allowing me to still use Dúnhere’s natural powers to deal with the worst baddies that the quest had to offer.

My Stage 2 took me along the Spider route, which was fine by me. There’s nothing like using Dúnhere to negate Hummerhorns, the Enemy with one of the worst engagement effects in the game! Stage 3 took my hand from me, but Beravor laughed at that and quickly built me a replacement hand. My engine got rolling pretty quickly, and by the end of the game it was fun to watch 3 Lórien Scouts use their 3 Maps of Rhovanion to consistently clear the Active Location, no matter how nasty it was.

My final challenge was to get past a souped-up Chieftain Ufthak. By that point I had plenty of Allies out that I could use as chump blockers, so it wasn’t actually too big of a deal to engage and kill him when the time came to deal the killing blow.

In all, it was a pretty dynamic game. Even when things didn’t go as expected, my deck rolled with the punches well; it was fun to find solutions to all of the problems that the encounter deck threw at me. It would be fun to go back and see how future runs against this quest would go if I took a different path. While the quest certainly has the potential to throw a few curveballs, I suspect I’d still be able to pull out a win most of the time.

Final thoughts

I had a great time with this quest, even though it’s a little on the easier side of things. It’s just challenging enough to be fun, and you’re bound to have something different and interesting happen with every fresh playthrough.

It’s worth noting that there are a handful of gotchas that require a firm understanding of the rules to properly execute, though. Many people are confused by how Quest progression works, and it’s easy to miss the fact that the Guarded keyword works a little differently from the Guarded (X) keyword in that the former triggers only on reveal but the latter triggers whenever the card enters play. Furthermore, keep in mind that an Objective-Location with Guarded (Location) cannot be guarded by another Objective-Location.

If you can get around those rules quirks, though, Lost in Mirkwood is probably my favorite quest from the Wilds of Rhovanion box—and that remains true even with a limited card pool.

But what about the final quest? The King’s Quest? How does it fare in a limited card pool? And how is the Wilds of Rhovanion overall as a companion to the Core Set? That will be my subject of inquiry next time!